Okay, Portal 2! What could be said about Portal 2 that wouldn’t already be
known by anyone who stumbles upon this blog?

Portal 2 is amazing? That’s a given since this is a product of Valve we are
talking about here. Valve just does a very good job on it’s games and Portal 2
is no different. This is a product that has been polished until not one little
error remained. Every line of dialog is a pleasant suprise, every puzzle an
innovative joy and I am only sad that it is so short.

For those who may have been laying beneath a rock – Portal 2 is a
first-person puzzle game built using Valve’s Source engine, that is the same
engine responsible for the likes of Team Fortress, Left 4 Dead, and
Half-Life 2. Except instead of focusing on run-and-gun gameplay, Portal uses
the first-person perspective for an entirely different take. Your gun shoots
portals. Left click and it sets an entrance on a wall. Right click anywhere else
and you create a doorway that will take you from one space to the next.

It’s like playing in an M.C. Escher painting and the challenge is simply being
able to visualize the problem of moving between point A and point B. At first
this is rather simple. Shoot a portal on a wall, put another one somewhere else
and hop through. But the puzzles become increasingly challenging as the game
progresses requiring a great deal of creativity upon the player’s part to simply
navigate the levels.

And as a companion to your trials you get a collection of some of the most
delightful, twisted characters that I have seen in a game before: GlaDOS,
Wheatley, and Cave Johnson exist to torment, mock, and serve up a kind of
science-experiment-gone-wrong scenario as Chell (our protagonist) delves into
the bowels of Aperture Science to uncover where it all began.

If I am beaming about the game it is because it is just that much fun. It has
been a long while since I hit a game that I just could not put down and Portal
2 is definitely hard to put down.

About

Joseph Hallenbeck attended the RTIS program at DigiPen Institute of Technology, studied Victorian-era literature at the University of Oxford, and graduated from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD with a B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature. He has worked as an interpretive ranger, naturalist, and caver for the National Park Service and is now employed as a Software Engineer at Research Square in Durham, NC.